Field
The present disclosure relates generally to a content-centric network (CCN). More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a system and method for parallel and secure retrieval of content along with information needed for consumption of the content in content-centric networks (CCNs).
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of information exchanges, from online movie viewing to daily news delivery, retail sales, and instant messaging, are conducted online. An increasing number of Internet applications are also becoming mobile. However, the current Internet operates on a largely location-based addressing scheme. The two most ubiquitous protocols, the Internet Protocol (IP) and Ethernet protocol, are both based on end-host addresses. That is, a consumer of content can only receive the content by explicitly requesting the content from an address (e.g., IP address or Ethernet media access control (MAC) address) that is typically associated with a physical object or location. This restrictive addressing scheme is becoming progressively more inadequate for meeting the ever-changing network demands.
Recently, information-centric network (ICN) architectures have been proposed in the industry where content is directly named and addressed. Content-centric Networking (CCN), an exemplary ICN architecture, brings a new approach to content transport. Instead of having network traffic viewed at the application level as end-to-end conversations over which content travels, content is requested or returned based on its unique name, and the network is responsible for routing content from the provider to the consumer. Note that content includes data that can be transported in the communication system, including any form of data such as text, images, video, and/or audio. A consumer and a provider can be a person at a computer or an automated process inside or outside the CCN. A piece of content can refer to the entire content or a respective portion of the content. For example, a newspaper article might be represented by multiple pieces of content embodied as data packets. A piece of content can also be associated with metadata describing or augmenting the piece of content with information such as authentication data, creation date, content owner, etc.
In CCN, content objects are signed and potentially encrypted. In order to authenticate and access the content of a file, the content consumer may need to retrieve a number of Content Objects and additionally information about the encryption keys and identities of the publisher. Sequential downloading of each Content Object and the additional key information may need multiple round trips to complete. Hence, before a content consumer can start the consumption of a content piece (which may span multiple Content Objects), the content consumer needs to download the metadata, which sometimes is attached to the end of all consumable content. This means that the content consumer may have to wait until all portions of the content are downloaded to download the decryption key, and hence cannot start consuming the already downloaded content portions.